After giving birth, some women save the placenta in order to consume it in the following weeks. In fact, Texas just passed a law giving women the right to take the placenta home from the hospital, the third state to do so.
Science doesn’t support a lot of the claims of its purported benefits. But for Melissa Mathis, it’s about her rights. Last year she had her baby, Betsy, in a Dallas hospital. When Mathis took Betsy home, she wanted to take the placenta home, too.
“As far as I was concerned it was a part of my body that was in my body. So it wasn’t like something, it didn’t really feel that strange to me,” Mathis says.
Like many women, Mathis had heard through friends about eating a little placenta every day in the weeks after giving birth.
The placenta, sometimes called the afterbirth, is typically dehydrated, ground up and put into edible capsules. Many midwives and doulas believe that because the placenta grows along with the fetus, it contains hormones and nutrients that can help a woman recover from childbirth.
Some say it helps women breastfeed or can prevent postpartum depression.
Mathis took the capsules for six weeks.
“It’s hard for me to know what the effects were because I don’t have anything to compare it to,” she says, “But I had great success breastfeeding, I had no problems with emotional instability. I definitely feel that it helped me.”
Mathis says the hardest part was just getting her placenta in the first place.
Texas classifies placentas as medical waste. And hospitals have liability concerns because placentas could carry infectious disease. Mathis says she spent months during her pregnancy communicating with hospital administrators about arranging custody of her placenta when the time came, but she says the answers she got were too vague.
So when Betsy arrived, Mathis and her husband waited until nobody was looking.
“And we were able to grab it, and we got it and put it in a cooler and threw it in a backpack and my husband handed it off to the placenta handler in the lobby of the hospital and that’s not ideal. And, in my opinion, that’s not acceptable.”
Mathis talked about it with her state representative, Dallas Republican Kenneth Sheets.
“It seemed like an issue that involves freedom and liberty and just a basic right and we just decided we’d take it on,” he says.
Sheets wrote the new law that allows women to keep placentas, if they sign a waiver and don’t test positive for infectious disease.
Texas is the third state in less than a decade to put a placenta law on the books. The first were Hawaii and then Oregon.
And yet doctors say there’s no scientific evidence behind all the health claims. Some women say the placenta helped them, but researchers say it’s probably just a placebo effect.
“We don’t have any studies on this,” says Dr. Catherine Spong, deputy director of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.
Spong is much more interested in how the placenta functions during pregnancy, not after.
“The placenta is really the lifeline. It serves as the baby’s lungs, the baby’s kidney, it has functions of the liver, of the GI tract,” Spong says. “Interestingly, it also has immune functions and endocrine functions.”
Spong says her institute will spend $44 million on placenta research over the next few years. She says she doesn’t feel comfortable offering an opinion on moms who eat placenta, simply reiterating that science doesn’t support it.
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